A Seminar to Inspire and Inform Essential Conversations
Wednesday, October 9th, 2019
Elm Grove Ev. Lutheran Church 945 N. Terrace Dr., Elm Grove, WI
Christian households and churches alike are trying to figure out how to navigate a world that seems to have lost its direction on foundational matters of faith, interpersonal relations, sexuality, marriage and family. How do we communicate the biblical story of God’s love in Christ Jesus to a culture that considers it outmoded and bigoted?
Anthony Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry and now serves as Professor and Writer-in-Residence at Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts. He earned his Baccalaureate degree at Princeton University. He completed his graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his M.A. and a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature. Along with teaching, Esolen is prolific, publishing books and articles with great regularity. Esolen has translated into English Dante’s Divine Comedy. In addition to multiple books, he is the author of numerous articles for a host of journals Some of his more recent books include:
- Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child. Intercollegiate Studies Institute. May 18, 2015.
- Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture. Regnery Publishing. 2017.
- The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord. Ignatius Press. 2019.
1. – Surveying the Rubble: A Hard Look at Cultural Decay
Anthony Esolen opens by confronting the stock objection that every generation imagines its own decline, then answers it three ways: decline need not be universal to be real, cultures demonstrably do collapse (Sparta, Athens, Rome, the British Empire), and the decay can simply be shown. Drawing on his collection of 1889 issues of Century magazine—where Huckleberry Finn ran beside sophisticated essays on art and on the differentiation of Christianity from Judaism—he demonstrates how much ordinary readers once knew and cared about art, faith, and their own heritage. He argues that whole forms of art and craft have vanished, that traditions of technique have been severed, and that most people now cannot even identify the Good Samaritan. Turning to family and school, he cites the same magazine’s warnings against stripping the family of its educational role, and laments a culture that raises boys and girls without direction toward manhood, womanhood, and marriage. He ends by naming the task as missionary: preaching Christ in what amounts to a pagan setting. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
2. – The View from the Basement: Living in a Subhuman Society
Esolen diagnoses modern man as alienated, contrasting him with Boethius, who wrote the Consolation of Philosophy in prison awaiting execution yet remained rooted in a living tradition of learning, in his duty to country, and above all in his Christian faith. Modern man, by contrast, sits in a ‘cave’ before screens, believes only in choice while having nothing of weight to choose, and is cut off from his past, his neighbors, and even his own body—the self-body dualism that lets a person say he has the wrong body. Through the film How Green Was My Valley, Esolen shows how ordinary, unschooled people once carried cultural and religious homes with them anywhere, whereas the mass man has no such home. He reads Genesis alongside the Sabbath command to argue that it is not good for man to be alone and that we are united only from above, by the Fatherhood of God; without shared worship, community itself frays. In the questions he addresses how alienation takes different forms across race and class while the underlying loss of human identity holds, praising figures like Jordan Peterson for filling a gap the churches and schools abandoned. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
3. – Recapturing the Vision: Building an Inhabitable World
In his remedies talk, Anthony Esolen insists one cannot give what one does not have, so Christians must deliberately build communities of prayer, healthy family life, and real education rather than wait for them to arise. He commends the Benedict option of intentional community, the Boethius option of taking up the distasteful work of politics because enemies will not stop, and above all the Bosco option—modeled on John Bosco, who went out into the streets to the boys, winning them with kindness, honesty, cleanness of life, and clear knowledge of what they needed. He urges reclaiming the imagination through good books, poetry, memorization, and the golden-age films that are allies against cultural garbage, and defends beauty and art by God’s own detailed instructions for the ark and the temple. He treats work, leisure, and the feast as things that require the presence of the divine, and points finally to Christ, whose cross is the only bridge across the abyss of a homeless age. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →
4. – Dialogue: What Does This Mean?
The closing dialogue takes questions from the pastors, covering how the church might reclaim the family’s proper responsibilities from the state, why modern schooling so often inoculates students against Shakespeare and the great books, and the formative power of memorized poetry for both preacher and hearer. Esolen recalls Rodney Stark’s account of how an obscure sect became the faith of the empire within a few centuries, notes the day C.S. Lewis, Aldous Huxley, and John F. Kennedy all died, and works a memorized couplet into a lesson on preaching. He closes by reciting Milton’s Satan—’Evil, be thou my good’—as a case study in the self-deception of the proud heart that has cut itself off from God. Watch the lecture and read the transcript →